“Once you’ve tacked 'Lacan' onto something, it’s sacred.”
An Interview with Susan Finlay
INTERVIEW BY CAITLIN MCLOUGHLIN
The Jacques Lacan Foundation by Susan Finlay was one of my favourite reads of last year. At the time, I described it as a romantic-comedy/academic-heist novel, an accolade I stand by. It’s certainly got what is perhaps one of the best opening lines I’ve ever read: “‘Cunt—’ It was as good a way to begin as any other…” The book follows Nicki Smith from Croydon, who rebrands as the privately educated Lettuce Croydon-Smyth so that she might fit in at the revered Jacques Lacan Foundation, an academic institute in Austin, Texas, where she has just taken on an admin role. What comes next is a rip-roaring satire of the world of academia, a poignant exploration of class politics and a playful celebration of the use—and misuse—of language. Oh, and it’s hilarious.
Finlay is also the author of Our Lady of Everything, Objektophilia, and My Other Spruce and Maple Self. Her most recent offering, The Lives of the Artists, published by Joan in 2023, marks a departure from fiction and is probably best described as a memoir. A spirited exploration of different literary forms, The Lives of the Artists delves into the sparking joys, the less-glamorous anxieties, and the relentless precarity of life as a creative (when you don’t have a financial safety net, that is).
We spoke a couple of months ago and with her trademark playfulness, Finlay gets into her fascination with psychoanalysis, style, and humour as a means of dissent.
The theme of this issue is psychoanalysis and I immediately thought of you and your book, The Jacques Lacan Foundation. Looking back at your work, psychoanalysis seems to reappear often in your writing. What is your relationship to it?
While I was at art college we had a couple of visiting lecturers—for instance Anouchka Grose, an analyst and writer—who came in on the critical studies module and talked a lot about psychoanalysis. There were also some very macho tutors who were against anything to do with this angle at all, so psychoanalysis was present as an idea, but at the same time had this illicit vibe. I genuinely do believe in it, I think it's really helpful, but there's another part of me that just likes the style. I like the North London intelligentsia, grey cashmere and red lipstick look. I find it appealing and at the same time, I find it very humorous. A figure like Jacqueline Rose, for example, she's this incredible mind, but she's also very, almost comically mannered, and a complete snob.
I always think of Jacqueline Rose as the Nigella Lawson of psychoanalysis. Do you know what I mean? Because she’s so glam, there’s something kind of alluring about her…
[Laughter] Yes! But also a little bit maternal.
I also love that there’s all these different groups of psychoanalysts that all hate each other; there's these really intense rivalries. I think there's many flaws in this strange, little world, but also that part of me is mocking it because there's some things that I struggle to get to grips with, which is, in a very human way, what we do sometimes when things are beyond us.
But it also comes from the sense that to find the flaws in something, you have to be fascinated by it.
It's funny you brought up poking fun at psychoanalysis because humour is not generally something that we associate it with – and yet, The Jacques Lacan Foundation is very funny. Are you writing, in that book, in opposition to the seriousness of psychoanalysis?
In one way it was quite instinctive – it was something that I had experienced as being both profound and humorous. In my very niche art-writing/film theory world Lacan is referenced a lot, but it’s almost become a shorthand for a type of intellectual posturing. Once you’ve tacked the word 'Lacan' onto something, it’s sacred. So the starting point was wanting to talk about this appropriation of Lacan's name as a kind of cultural capital. But at the same time, I wanted the book to be a metaphor for Lacan's theories and this idea of questioning whether we can have a core self; how the characters in the book are both conditioned by the late-capitalist landscape and condition said landscape too.
When I spoke to Isabel Waidner last year, they talked about the importance of humour as a profound means of relating to the world, particularly for queer or working class people. How do you understand the way you use humour in your writing?
I think humour is really important. I always think of that famous quote, that the point of satire is to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted [Finley Peter Dunne]. It's a way of readdressing power from the position of the outside. I’m even thinking of the carnival in medieval times, where the fool played the king or whatever. I see my writing as both humorous and political in equal measure.
In the review of The Jacques Lacan Foundation that you talk about in The Lives of the Artists, it suggests that the book “took a completely ironic and therefore nihilistic stance.” As you write in the book, I really dispute this! To me your writing feels like a real antidote to nihilism. The main character Nicki (or Lettuce) is masquerading as someone else so she can access this world of academia. But then it transpires that everyone is masquerading as someone else, and there’s this hilarious moment of recognition that feels kind of optimistic.
That was really important to me actually, that in the end, everybody is a fake. And that means that they're all kind of on the same side. Even the Lacanians and the Jungians—in the end they're ‘fake’ Lacanians and ‘fake’Jungians—are all pretending to be posh. You can read it on a number of levels, but one is that we're all in it together and all doing what we can to get by. It's a very optimistic, silly book. Hopefully silly in a clever way. [Laughter] Humour is important and as you so rightly say, a sort of political weapon if you are on the fringes.
In your recent article for Spike Art Magazine you write about the precarity of trying to live as an artist without a privileged up-bringing, which often involves “balancing the day job, or taxable hours doing tedious things.” You advocate for more literature that acknowledges this reality. Why do you think class is so overlooked or neglected in literature and the arts?
Well, I should say that I am middle class. But at the same time, I am someone who's always been financially independent, went to a state school, all the rest of it. I think when you work in the arts you realise what a crazy world is. I think, oh God, if it's like this for me, what's it like for the queer person of colour in Newcastle?
In Germany, where I'm based, there's been this huge clamping down on any sort of Palestinian solidarity, huge amounts of cancellations by both major and minor arts institutions. It's really interesting how it’s suddenly exposed the way things are really run. Not just in the sense of having wealthy investors tied to Israel and needing to pander to them, but also how being predominantly state funded isn't great either, in that it means that whatever you do or do not show is controlled by the state's ideology.
There's been all these moves in the arts to show that Germany is this inclusive, multicultural society—you'll walk into an exhibition on post-colonialism and they'll have all these books about it lined up by the coffee-shop—but then these same organisations have cancelled anyone who even says Free Palestine. It makes you see how hollow these sentiments are, and also that the inclusion of minorities was only ever provisional and conditional.
I think the same things apply to class: if you are a working class person working in the arts, then you have to play a certain role that suits the establishment at that time.
I saw that you did a residency at the Freud Museum, what did that look like?
As part of my PhD I was allowed to undertake a placement. I liked the work of art historian and writer, Alice Butler who had also completed a PhD in the same department at the same uni I had, as well as a placement at the Freud Museum. I thought, Oh I'd like to do that too. However, it ended up coinciding with the lockdown. So I did produce a couple of little things for the Museum blog, and I attempted to make an alternative audio guide for visitors. I wanted the guide to be two voices, that weren’t explicitly a therapist’s or an analyst’s voice, but led you to assume that they were, before then hearing these two voices break down; becoming more and more chaotic the more objects they encountered. I don't think the Museum ever made it public. It was quite a strange residency.
It sounds like lockdown threw everything a bit off the rails?
Yeah, lockdown really changed my perception of myself. I had PhD funding and for the first six months I thought, this is great. I'm just getting on with all my writing and pottering about. I was almost a bit scathing, like, oh, all these people complaining because they can't bear their own company, look at me, I'm fine. And then after about six months I was like, I've gone mad. I'm so lonely and the world is ending. I realised that I am far more of a social being than I had ever allowed myself to admit before. It made me value my friends and family.
But also, it helped me to understand that, if you're going to write convincingly about other people's lives, then you have to have access to other people's lives.
You reference lockdown a lot in your book The Lives of the Artists, how did you find writing during this period?
I know that The Lives of the Artists talks a lot about lockdown, but the parts written during that period came out in little scraps and were then re-assembled as this period ended. So, although it is technically a lockdown book, it didn't feel like a lockdown book to me. Or to put it another way, it felt too depressing in lockdown to write about being depressed in lockdown. I'm sure a lot of writers say this, but writing is quite therapeutic and I think that's probably why so many people enjoy doing things like journaling, even if they don't see themselves as an author. Even when I'm writing about a fictional character and thinking about how this person might react in such and such a situation, or how they're responding to the world around them, I'm always thinking about myself. I often have really messed up characters who are working through things, because it’s more interesting for me to explore those darker aspects of my psyche.
But the more messed up the character, the more I have to be in a good place to write them.
I mean, I know Jean Rhys didn't exactly have the happiest life or write the happiest books, but I read something once about how she couldn't create anything unless she was in a relatively happy place. That made sense to me. Of course, you have to be able to access those darker aspects of yourself if you're going to create a character who embodies those things convincing. But in reality, anyone who churns out creative stuff has to have a boring side too. It's a lovely vision of a writer, isn't it? Heartbroken, smoking. I'm very seduced.
But as I've gotten older, I've come to terms with the fact that I am also the sort of person who files their tax return five days after the tax year ends, and that's just as much of a reason why I'm a novelist as anything else.
That goes back to the precarity of trying to survive as an artist or a writer, potentially having to navigate between many different jobs and projects.
I suppose that, from a psychoanalytic perspective, this can be read in terms of which aspects of yourself you choose to show to (different) others, and how these can become fragmented. It can be positive – you get to try out different parts of yourself. But it can also be difficult, particularly in the arts, where people blur the personal and the private so much. I have a very millennial approach to social media: I don't know how to do it, but I obsess over it constantly. I embody the worst of both worlds. [Laughter]
Style is a key component to your writing in the sense of fashion and literary style. The Lives of the Artists is somewhat of an exercise in style, with each chapter taking on a different format – prose, poetry, libretto, script and (my favourite) powerpoint presentation notes. What excites you about style and about trying on different literary forms?
There used to be this column in The Independent, I think, by Peter York on adverts, where he would try to deconstruct what they meant. I used to find that fascinating. He also wrote lots of stuff about Sloane Rangers and Princess Diana and a very funny article about how Kath Kidson had killed West London. Nowadays it makes me feel a bit sick because we live in such an evil, hyper-capitalist world, but as a provincial teenager I remember thinking how incredibly exciting it would be to work in advertising, in London. I still find adverts like the Silk Cut one exciting. I love that you can create a mood for a product with no reference to the product itself. It takes such skill and intelligence, and to be honest I only want to work with publishers and writers who understand that kind of intelligence too, even if it limits my options.
A nice thing about art school is that you can say, I'm going to form a band or write a book, and everyone's like, great, do it. No one's like, oh, but you are in product design, you must make a chair. Which is really freeing. I received funding to do a PhD in creative writing, in a very old fashioned English Studies department. For lots of people it was a brilliant place to be, but it made no sense to someone from my background and I don't think I made any sense to the other people there either. I had one supervisor who's very well respected, and he would read my work and offer a few, usually very useful pointers. But the one thing that drove me mad was how he kept saying, how is this literary? And, who are your literary references? And I felt like, this is the 21st century! Instead, I used to say, oh, I'm also influenced by film, which I am. But then I just thought, yeah, I'm also interested in ten second advertisements. I'm also influenced by somebody's social media feed.
I want my writing to reflect that kind of fragmentary way of experiencing the world.
It seems like there's this attempt to preserve the tradition of the literary and not really let anything else inside its bubble.
I think the idea of preservation is really interesting. To make creative stuff and put it out in the world, and to get things published, you've got to have a bit of an ego. I'd like to say I didn't, but I do like seeing my name on a book. Or if somebody in 50 years was like, oh yes, this is an early Susan Finlay, that would be wonderful. But at the same time, I don’t agree with the idea that if you have lots of references to popular culture, it will limit who it appeals to and who understands it. Once you start thinking about how a book will be received in 10 years time, then the excitement goes. In fact, I almost like the idea of something going out of date. I like being ‘of the moment.’ One of the things I find really frustrating about publishing, even indie press publishing where things are done more spontaneously, is that if you want bookshops to stock your books, it's standard for there to be at least a year from the book being finished to it coming out. If you think about when you get your idea, then the time it takes you to finish writing it up, then to shop it around in the hope of finding a publisher, and then a year or more before it actually comes out – well, my fear is that it's going to be totally irrelevant by then and miss the moment it belongs to.
You’re also the editor of Moist. Could you tell us about it?
I originally set it up with my dad, and it was officially his press. Everyone then thinks my dad funded it, which he didn't. We made a successful application for an Arts Council grant and actually sold some books. But we did put it solely in his name because we wanted to put one of my books forward for a prize, which we couldn't do otherwise. A couple of my parents' retired neighbours also helped out in the beginning, so it was this sort of grey power thing, which was quite amusing because none of these nice people really had any interest in the books we were publishing, they were just a bit bored and liked the idea of ringing up the printers and stuff. It was funny, these quite conservative elderly people in the Midlands running this avant-garde press. But my dad is going to be 85 next birthday, and I think he was finding a bit much. So it's now myself, Nastassja Simensky and Hugh Nicholson. We've run it together for nearly a year now. And yeah, it's fun! It grew out of what I think most small presses grow out of, which is not seeing the kind of things that you want to see in print. Also knowing lots of people who make you think, oh, they're great writers. I'd love to publish something with them. Hugh and Nastassja are both practising artists. It is really nice working with people who share my art background. At the same time, it's weird, because I'm now the 'most literary' in the group.
Susan Finlay is an artist who writes poetry and fiction, most recently The Jacques Lacan Foundation, a White Review Book of the Year. Her work has been published in Worms, MAP, POETRY, and The Stinging Fly.
Caitlin McLoughlin is editor & designer of Worms.
